The first time that Riley visits, the body still has the shape of a man. Each time she returns, the Order have stretched it further, adapting it to the pipes. They sever his bones to spread his limbs; they thread the vessels and tendons around the metal conduits. When the steam rushes through, he still screams. The chains looping over his joints and scraping into his fascia work the valves, releasing bursts that scald the remnants of his skin and introduce new rhythms to the quaking of his muscles.
Riley is not sure whether his diaphragm fails, or whether they take the step of disabling it. Now a pendulum interrupts the falling of an iron weight, sets the hold-release rhythm for the gear train that works the bellows that operate his lungs.
Soon, the steamworks provide syncopations of intolerable heat to each portion of his body. Only the supply of blood itself is more intimate. And the Order is still working.
The Priest is there each time Riley returns. At first, they content themselves with acknowledging her, passing dark and hollow eyes over her. Then they allow themselves a smile. It begins as pride in their work, but it becomes by degrees more contented, more grateful, more warm.
One day, when Riley is about to leave with the reason she came, their fingers clasp over hers. "We are rewarded that you return so often," they tell her. And somehow, those ink-black eyes watching her from that scarified and augmented face make it personal. Somehow, the reward for the Priest is Riley herself, in specific and particular, with all that she did and failed to do.
Riley is working up to say "Thank you."
* * *
Colin is waiting for her on the sidewalk when she returns. The building quietly reassembles itself behind her, concealing the entrance. Reality weaves back and covers up the beyond-and-more-than.
He gives her a bit of the stink-eye. "Honestly?" He asks. "Again?"
"Look," she tells him, "in their defense, the coffee is really good."
The Priest approaches her. As ever, Riley thinks, the Priest fairly glides. Each step spells out a clear message of patience and inevitability.
This time, the Priest is carrying a plate, and the plate is not empty. Her two-handed carriage, palms turned up, and the slight inclination of her head — she is signaling a measure of humility that feels all wrong here. Gods do not make offerings to mortals.
The voice of the Priest is her unchanging rasp, buzzing and breathy and in a low register that Riley had only reached or provoked in moments of passionate invitation. "A sample," she says. "A vegan breakfast sandwich."
It had been Nora, Riley suddenly remembers, who had gone all plant-based during the first COVID spring, not out of any grand plan but because that had just been the easiest way to buy food in bulk.
Anything Riley can think of saying feels like a cheap joke. She reaches out, lifts the sandwich from the plate and raises it to her lips.
The English muffin is perfectly intersticated, the nooks and vacuoles within its matrix trapping salted plant butter, the bread matter itself rich with oats and sesame. The cheese surrogate complements it flawlessly, bringing nutritional yeast to the party. The textured-vegetable-protein sausage explodes on her tongue with red pepper flakes, sage, ground fennel seeds, maple syrup....
It is decadent, and it sends her recollecting back across the years to the few meals that had been indulgent, that had been carefree — a jazz brunch after a Saturday night of marathon fucking — a chocolate cake, baked inside an orange peel, on the camping trip three weeks before her father died. Nora, jestingly slapping her own stomach and saying that after lockdown she could fit into shirts from high school again, so don't knock it.
And now the griddle-heat and the spice-heat have primed her senses. The doors of perception open like she has skipped to the plateau of an LSD trip. She feels the roughness of the bread under her fingers, and it is a forensic library, a map of all the past instants that led to the sensations of this moment. The beading of her own sweat is almost too much to bear without screaming. She sees honeycombs and spiderwebs and petroglyphic spirals in the backs of her eyelids. And then she opens her eyes to see the Priest, and she falls to her knees.
There is nothing that is not carnal here, now, as she sees the partings of the Priest's flesh, appreciates for the first time the infinite care that had been taken to shape those modifications.
"You begin to understand," the Priest observes.
Every human lover had been a pitifully inadequate rehearsal for the invitation now being made to her.
"Each sensation serves a purpose," the Priest tells her.
Every human ritual had been a mockery of the truth being promised now, devotion to God at the command of God.
"Would you like," the Priest asks, "the clarity of the razor wire? Such a simple pure tone, on which to build such harmonies of adoration."
The chains, Riley knows, are waiting.
Colin is running late. He barely has time to grab an energy drink --- Tornado Raptor Punch, or some such thing whose flavor would otherwise just be called a color --- and a few Reese's to shove into his face hole. The holiday kind; he's not unsophisticated, after all. He definitely doesn't have time to pack a lunch, so come eleven thirty he's trying to make the best of it at the prefab sandwich place around the corner from the downtown office.
The boy is sandy-haired, with pale gray eyes. He is investigating the salad boxes, so Colin offers, "The Santa Fe is better than the Caesar, if you ask me."
They keep chatting through the queue and after the cashier. It turns out that the boy is in town for a conference that's taken over the convention center and two hotels. The annual meeting of the Society for Biblical Literature, of all things. The boy is presenting on variants in the Apocrypha, divergences among manuscript copies of the Book of Enoch, trying to squeeze a year of his life into fifteen minutes that matter more for his career than he wants to think about. They sit outside the sandwich shop. Their conversation flows easily, and after maybe half an hour Colin is the one to ask, "Will you be free tonight, after all your panels and keynotes?"
"I can free up my evening if I try," the boy says.
"I know a great Thai place a few stops from here on the subway," Colin offers.
Their first kiss, at the quiet alcove table behind the aquarium, is almost clunky in its forcefulness, and it tastes a little of Thai iced tea.
"I have to be at the conference early tomorrow," the boy says, apologetically. "But I do have a room to myself. A tiny one," he adds.
And so they go back to the hotel. "There's only one bed," Colin jokes (and there is not much room beyond the bed in any direction).
"Oh noes," the boy replies.
The boy is eager, timid, grateful. Colin has never known a partner to be so voluble with his compliments.
When they are both spent, the boy is apologetic. "I guess that was my getting-over-a-breakup fuck," he says.
"I don't mind," Colin tells him. There's not much point in trying to explain how his boyfriend had been taken beyond the veil of reality by sadomasochists from Hell.
Colin misses being fluid-bonded. He misses lazy morning cuddles and poetry in bed and the way that, if he woke during the night, he could tell the time by Matt's stage of sleep, from his side to his back to spread out like the Vitruvian Man.
They shower together and then climb back into bed. The boy talks more about his studies, about the convention. Thousands of academics expounding to each other about gospels of brotherhood, while stepping over homeless people. Wondering whether he had only stuck with it this far because he was worse at everything else.
Colin has seen what it means to really and truly take faith seriously.
He'd rather not see that again.
The boy sleeps. Colin pulls his tablet out of his bag, slides on his noise-canceling headphones, and decides to zone out with cooking shows.
("Nora," he remembers saying. "You're sharing thirst traps of the Bon Appetit test kitchen. That's not normal.")
Why does every sponsor for a YouTube series sound like a scam? Best case, their monthly subscription delivers you a mediocre box of whatever, and their godawful customer support makes it a pain and a half to cancel. Worst case, the VPN probably tracks your porn habits and the earbuds give you cancer of the ear canal.
"This episode is brought to you by the Channard Institute. Millions of Americans struggle with mental health issues. At the Channard Institute, we give you the help you need at a price you can afford..."
He is lost deep in autoplay, his thoughts wandering off, when his attention suddenly snaps back.
Hot oil is pouring over a bowl of crushed red chiles and Szechuan peppercorns. And a very familiar hand is extending a pinky into the sizzling oil, lifting up as though to taste the result...
"Good evening, Colin."
The Hell Priest is staring at him out of his tablet computer.
"You need not speak. Why risk waking your lover?"
Colin realizes that the idea of a sane response to this situation doesn't really apply.
"It is so rare that a sacrifice is turned back from the edge and released into humanity once more." The Priest smiles at him. "You are quite the curiosity. And we appreciate novelty, not just in pain alone." The face in the screen looks from him to the boy. "We could send you the box. You could make the choice that Riley did not. Find a handful of lives that you believe the world could do without, and the Lazarus Configuration will return him to you."
As a monstrous thing? As a man so warped by the Labyrinth that Colin could never love him? Could Matt, somehow restored to life and sanity, love or even forgive him for that trade? Voight had said that the Cenobites played "tricks". Was that the truth of it, or were they instead fair in a way that humans were not built to fathom?
"Riley," the Priest savored the name, "suffers so deliciously. She lives in an agony of self-reflection and self-doubt. She knows where to find the simplicity of release, and she fears it so. We hold her blood, and it binds us into your lives. She knows that the gift of Lament can never be returned, only exchanged. Lazarus? Lauderant? The dance has only just begun..."
Nora's consciousness rose from the darkness. Her first thought was to expect pain. She had been pulled out of the van, out of life and reality as she understood it, into a continuum of torment. The mutilated thing with a woman's face and robes made of flesh had twisted her, bled her, probed her throat with a nail. And then — no, there were no words, no context. She had fallen, she had split. She should have died. But she was alive, and she felt no pain. She was resting on her side, atop a smooth slab of stone. The only light came from two insufficient braziers in opposite corners of the rock-cut chamber — light that was caught and returned by the mirrors that showed Nora her own body, the skinless expanse of her back, the metal implanted along the edges of her opened flesh, spanning it with new steel ribs that had been drilled into her vertebrae.
"The pain will come," the Hell Priest said, "when it is necessary. And we know when it will be necessary. We have been doing this a very long time."
"What — what did you do to me?" Her voice was dry, raspy, with a clicking underneath.
"Fortunate Nora. So decent, so often making the right choice by instinct. A human who tortured herself when she lost hold of the ideals that she knew no human could maintain. A pawn in a scheme of revenge and escape. And then, delivered unto us for your uplifting." The Hell Priest circled about the stone slab. Nora, afraid to move, afraid what her body would do if she tried to move, followed with her eyes the reflections. "Your terror was so pure, child. And the shock when your friends saw the first stage of your transformation — yes, child, you made glorious music."
The Hell Priest raised a hand. The new nerves in Nora's body obeyed, and she rose to a sitting position, her legs crossed on the altar.
The weight of her body felt wrong. Things had been added in new places within.
"Please," Nora said. "I'll do anything. I just want —" And then her head swiveled on her neck so that she stared directly at the Cenobite.
"Doing 'anything'... What a pallid imitation of feeling everything."